The effects of emotional salience on emotion-induced blindness

Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology submitted time 2023-06-19

QIU Huiyan LYU Yong

Abstract： In most visual scenes, the visual system cannot process all the information simultaneously; instead, it processes certain information first. Emotional stimuli are more likely to attract the attention of the visual system than non-emotional stimuli. However, it may be challenging to suppress the attention gained by emotional stimuli (though such a stimulus is irrelevant), and it may result in Emotion-induced Blindness (EiB), whereby the presence of an emotional stimulus fails to correlate with a task that attracts an individual’s attention. Therefore, individuals become “blinded” to a rapidly presented target stimulus. The present study investigated the effects of physical and emotional salience of emotional distractors on EiB under different background conditions using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. This study used a three-factor design in which background conditions (similar vs. dissimilar), disturbance types (negative vs. neutral vs. baseline), and lag (Lag2 vs. Lag8) were all within-participant variables. The dependent variable was the accuracy of the target judgment. This study consisted of three main phases. First, we applied a 2.5 cm × 2.5 cm (500 ms) black “+” fixation point with 0.39× 0.39 degrees a visual angle (DVA) that appeared in the center of the screen followed by an RSVP stimulus stream consisting of 15 images (100 ms each). Key disturbance images appeared randomly at several positions, ranging from four to six, in the stimulus stream. The baseline disturbances were selected from the same set of background images. The target stimulus appeared at either position 2 (Lag2) or position 8 (Lag8) following the presentation of the disturbance stimulus. At the end of each sequence, participants were instructed to answer whether the target stimulus was rotated to the left or right by pressing the “F” or “J” keys. 
The study utilized a repeated-measures ANOVA to analyze the impact of background conditions (similar vs. dissimilar), lag (2 vs. 8), and type of distractor (negative vs. neutral vs. baseline) on the correct rate of target identification by the study participants. Experiment 1 showed that EiB occurred under different background conditions but disappeared under similar background conditions. Experiment 2 compared the differences in EiB between the two groups under background conditions after adding a red rectangular border to the key distractor pictures. In Experiment 2, EiB occurred under dissimilar background conditions for both negative and neutral conditions, which is consistent with the findings of Experiment 1. However, the magnitude of the EiB was much greater in Experiment 2 (25%) than in Experiment 1 (17%). Additionally, under similar background conditions, the EiB produced by negative pictures was significantly larger than in Experiment 1 (10% vs. 3%). We also noted that individual notice of the emotional salience of the distractors had a significant effect on EiB, which was restored once cued to negative distractors under similar background conditions. In summary, the EiB phenomenon is driven by the physical salience of emotional distractors, rather than emotional salience. Additionally, the current findings showed that EiB was related to the attentional resources associated with distractor stimuli; in other words, the more attentional resources attracted by distractor stimuli, the more likely the occurrence of EiB. The number of attentional resources attracted by distractor stimuli was related to the difference in stimulus attributes and the number of attentional resources.

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